TRADICIONES INVENTADAS Y DEMOCRATIZACIÓN DESDE LAS PERIFERIAS RURALES: La fiesta de sant Antoni en Mallorca durante el tardofranquismo y la transición.

The article discusses how the popular carnavalesque festivities of Sant Antoni in Mallorca contributed from below to the social and political democratisation of Mallorca. For this purpose, we analysed the cases of the municipalities of Artà and Manacor, in the rural peripheries of the east of the island. These festivities were deeply intervened and domesticated during the National Catholic period of Franco's regime, and during the 1960s they were abandoned by the institutions and consequently lost popular participation. However, from the end of the 1960s onwards, they were reinvented from below by rescuing the most carnival-like elements that had previously been repressed, and creating new rites with a traditional rural appearance. This led to the fiesta becoming a platform for popular protest and political participation carried out by incipient local civil organisations which later played a leading role in the transition to democracy at the municipal level. At a time like the 1970s, when civil rights were not yet guaranteed and political debate in the public sphere was not yet entirely free, the old regional festivals of carnival origin became a shield of apparent political innocence from which political dissidence could be discreetly expressed and mobilising muscle could be trained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]